WELCOME TO OUR KITCHEN: We're talking about photography in cookbooks!
Food photography. We know it's now crucial to the success of a cookbook. But it wasn't always so. We'll tell what we've seen over three dozen cookbooks published in the last twenty-five years.
We're Bruce Weinstein & Mark Scarbrough. We're the team behind dozens of cookbooks, tens of thousands of published original recipes, and a long career in the food publishing business.
Here are the segments for this episode of COOKING WITH BRUCE & MARK:
[01:09] One-minute cooking tip: Pick the smallest chicken.
[03:40] What's happened to food photography in cookbooks over the twenty-five years we've been in the food business? How has photography changed with the advent of the internet? We'll give you an overview of food photography from our three-dozen-cookbook persepctive.
[19:32] What’s making us happy info this week? China China and conserves (a lower-sugar jam with chilis or other aromatics).
Transcript
Hey, I'm Bruce Weinstein, and this is the podcast Cooking with Bruce and Mark.
Speaker:And I'm Mark Scarbrough, and together with Bruce, we have written 36 cookbooks,
Speaker:are currently writing number 37.
Speaker:We'll tell you much more about that as we go along.
Speaker:We are in the middle of a huge gigantic Gantic photo shoot for that book.
Speaker:And then we're in the middle of it.
Speaker:We're on a break from it.
Speaker:It happened last week before we recorded this and it's about to happen
Speaker:in front of us again so that we can produce 125 shots for that book.
Speaker:It's unbelievable.
Speaker:The amount of work that goes on a shout out to the greatest photographer ever.
Speaker:Eric Medsker.
Speaker:You can look him up online.
Speaker:He shoots gorgeous food.
Speaker:This is the 13th, 13th book he shot with us, but we're not gonna
Speaker:talk about that kind of a little.
Speaker:Actually, in this podcast, we've got a one minute cooking tip coming up.
Speaker:We want to talk about the state of food photography and the state of cooking.
Speaker:Books and food photography and what has happened to it over the 25 years that we
Speaker:have been doing this and we'll tell you what's making us happy in food this week.
Speaker:So let's get started.
Speaker:Our one minute cooking tip, pick the smallest chicken when you laugh
Speaker:out loud, when you were shopping,
Speaker:my grandmother would be nightmared over
Speaker:this is actually something that Ina Garten is always telling people.
Speaker:Pick the smallest chicken bigger does not always mean better with chickens.
Speaker:A five pound chicken won't roast as easily or evenly as a three pound chicken.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:And it won't be as tender either.
Speaker:Remember?
Speaker:So, okay, I'm old and as we all know, and back in the day when you bought chickens,
Speaker:they were two and a half to three pounds.
Speaker:The, and that was, those were the roasters and now the roasters
Speaker:are five and six pound behemoths.
Speaker:It's
Speaker:not seven and eight.
Speaker:They're like small turkeys at this point.
Speaker:Yeah, they're these giant things.
Speaker:And I remember, this is a decade ago, but I remember getting so
Speaker:shocked when I saw these behemoths.
Speaker:big chickens in the meat counter.
Speaker:I thought, wait a minute.
Speaker:What happened to those little chickens?
Speaker:I used to buy those things that now look like Cornish game in roasted chicken is
Speaker:supposed to be an easy dinner, right?
Speaker:You salt it, you shove it in the oven and potentially my favorite dinner.
Speaker:And in an hour you have dinner.
Speaker:Now it's going to take two hours, two and a half hours for a chicken.
Speaker:It's not going to cook evenly by the time that big oversized chicken breast is done.
Speaker:The legs are overcooked.
Speaker:It's really.
Speaker:Not so good to get a big chicken.
Speaker:And just to say before we pass off this one final thing, Bruce
Speaker:is the only human I ever met who roasts a turkey off the holidays.
Speaker:Bruce, when I met him, we're on birds and roasting birds.
Speaker:Bruce would just roast a turkey midweek.
Speaker:I learned that from my mom.
Speaker:That's what she did.
Speaker:And I learned to like it.
Speaker:And so he would just randomly roast turkeys when he found
Speaker:them on sale at the supermarket.
Speaker:And so we'd have turkey soup and turkey sandwiches and roast turkey one night.
Speaker:Like I said, I'd never met anybody who roasted a turkey
Speaker:off a holiday until I met Bruce.
Speaker:So maybe I'll roast a turkey this week.
Speaker:There you go.
Speaker:Before we get to the next segment of this podcast, it would be great if you could
Speaker:rate this podcast and even write a review.
Speaker:As you know, we Unsupported and have chosen to remain that way.
Speaker:So that is the way you could help us out.
Speaker:If you just give us a rating, dare I ask for five stars?
Speaker:And if you just write a review on whatever platform you're on, even
Speaker:good podcast, that is fantastic.
Speaker:I know you can't write a review on Spotify and some platforms,
Speaker:but Apple still lets you do it.
Speaker:Google's gone away, I guess at this point, but Apple lets you still do it.
Speaker:And it would be terrific for us.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:Up next in the podcast itself, we want to talk about food photography and
Speaker:cookbooks and what has happened over the 25 years we have been doing this.
Speaker:What did cookbooks look like before the internet?
Speaker:And I think you say the internet, like, can I just halt and say, what I think
Speaker:you mean is before social media, because there were cookbooks after the, I mean,
Speaker:listen, I was writing for this podcast.
Speaker:Start of AOL in 1991, there was the internet, but what there
Speaker:wasn't was the just absolute dump of photographs off social media.
Speaker:That's true.
Speaker:I
Speaker:mean, really, it was the digital revolution and social media.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:So cookbooks Okay, so go on, please.
Speaker:Cookbooks often had No photos whatsoever.
Speaker:And if you think about the New York Times cookbook, the joy of
Speaker:cooking, they had no photos or
Speaker:Julia Child mastering the art of French cooking, no photos,
Speaker:Marcella Hassan's books and our
Speaker:Big, big, big, early book, The Ultimate Cookbook, 900 recipes,
Speaker:no photos, not even on the cover.
Speaker:Whereas a lot of books Wait,
Speaker:wait, wait, I have to say, we were in San Antonio, you're right, what you can
Speaker:say, we were in San Antonio once on a food tour, cooking school tour, and that
Speaker:book, The Ultimate Cookbook, actually hit the bestseller list as an instant hit.
Speaker:ebook and it has no photos in it and I think part of the hitting the best
Speaker:seller list as an ebook had to do with the lack of photos because photos are
Speaker:weird in e cookbooks they bunch toward the end or toward the beginning they're
Speaker:not necessarily laid out in design but you're right cookbooks before the internet
Speaker:like I think about uh Jane Buttel's Tex Mex or revolutionary Tex Mex Book from
Speaker:what like the 80s that I don't think there's any photography in that book
Speaker:It's true some had the Martha Stewart books early on had gorgeous photography
Speaker:There were some books that were lifestyle coffee table books But those ended
Speaker:up being as we saw them coffee table books They were they weren't like the
Speaker:books you use for dinner every night
Speaker:and one of the things that Martha Stewart did did is she crossed the
Speaker:line between lifestyle and cookbook.
Speaker:She did.
Speaker:And she made this kind of crossover that very few people
Speaker:were making happen back in the day.
Speaker:And you know, when we first were shooting cookbooks, and when we were first writing
Speaker:cookbooks, none of our cookbooks from the late 90s and the early 2000s have
Speaker:anything Any pictures in them except the cover, and we should just say
Speaker:that, uh, we're in the middle, as I say, of a photo shoot for a book right
Speaker:now, and it was going to go on later.
Speaker:We're shooting a lot, 125 photos.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:Back in the day, we shot one photo and it was the cover.
Speaker:It was the cover.
Speaker:And we spent all day, that's right,
Speaker:we'd spend an entire day shooting one shot for a cover
Speaker:shot and the photographer would be paid a fortune.
Speaker:I have to tell the story.
Speaker:So we were shooting the cover for our book, Cooking for Two, in which
Speaker:we had this theory that it was kind of actually before it's time.
Speaker:We had this theory that every recipe made for two and there was never any waste.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:cut an onion or opened a can.
Speaker:You used all of it.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:I still
Speaker:love that.
Speaker:I know.
Speaker:It's kind of now the point, but at the time it was ahead of its time.
Speaker:So we were shooting the cover and we went to this big loft in
Speaker:Manhattan before Martha Stewart moved into this Chelsea neighborhood.
Speaker:These were still kind of just big open lofts and we went to this loft and um,
Speaker:the photographer was there and there were, I don't know, five or six, 20 year
Speaker:old young women running around, setting the place settings, doing everything.
Speaker:And this is the days before smartphones.
Speaker:So let's say this is about 2001, maybe 2000.
Speaker:And the photographer was.
Speaker:in the corner sitting on a stool on a flip phone talking while these women
Speaker:were setting up the shoot, setting up the props, setting up the table, getting the
Speaker:camera angle, and then they would call him over and he would look through the lens
Speaker:of the camera and he would literally say, uh uh, and walk back and sit on his stool.
Speaker:And so then they would race around and reset the table and reset the angle.
Speaker:This went on
Speaker:All day.
Speaker:All day for one shot.
Speaker:And the same thing happened when we wrote our very first book,
Speaker:The Ultimate Ice Cream Book.
Speaker:And the cover of that book is beautiful.
Speaker:It's a little frosted pewter bowl of two scoops of chocolate ice cream.
Speaker:It's true.
Speaker:And I went to that shoot and there was the photographer and
Speaker:her assistant and a food stylist.
Speaker:And probably the food stylist's assistant.
Speaker:And they had scooped out, oh, a hundred scoops of chocolate ice
Speaker:cream to get the most perfect scoop.
Speaker:It took us all day to get the perfect scoop in the perfect
Speaker:bowl with the perfect light.
Speaker:And it was, that was it.
Speaker:It was all day for that one
Speaker:shot.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And I think this, this is what's really interesting is that, uh, one
Speaker:of the things that happened back then, back in the day before social media
Speaker:is that everything had to be perfect.
Speaker:And there were very few ways.
Speaker:to fake it other than either to make completely fake food, which I
Speaker:should just add, Bruce and I have always had a dictum about our books
Speaker:that the food cannot be faked.
Speaker:Now a lot of food stylists will like take Crisco and they'll color
Speaker:Crisco and they'll, you know, ice it a little, there's some tricks you
Speaker:can get a glistening surface on it.
Speaker:And then they'll scoop that up and it's totally fake and
Speaker:they'll call it ice cream.
Speaker:But we have always in every single one of our 36 books insisted that.
Speaker:Everything is real to the recipe, and I have to say, we go so far, it's so
Speaker:obsessive, we go so far that, let's say we're making a big beef stew for a
Speaker:photograph, and it calls for a half a teaspoon of dried thyme, we will actually
Speaker:put the dried thyme in the, in the stew, even though we know that will never show
Speaker:up in the shot, we are insistent that it be Actually, the dish from the recipe
Speaker:also, we all want to eat it when we're, when we break the set, but the
Speaker:fake ice cream kills me when the ice cream book first came out, I went on
Speaker:QVC with it and the book premiered on the 4th of July in 1999 and we
Speaker:were in outdoors in Philadelphia.
Speaker:It was 150.
Speaker:5, 000 degrees out and we were selling this ice cream book.
Speaker:So we had all these bowls of ice cream coming out of the machine that was soup.
Speaker:And then we had all these bowls of food styled ice cream to
Speaker:show them that weren't melting.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:It was like 8, 000 degrees.
Speaker:They were all the fake ice cream.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And back in the day.
Speaker:So this is pre social media and pre the internet.
Speaker:When we started out, basically there were prop houses, houses that.
Speaker:Uh, have cooking props, dishes, cookware, glassware, napkins,
Speaker:tablescapes, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker:They have all that stuff, these prop houses.
Speaker:For rent.
Speaker:And, yes, and you rent them.
Speaker:And mostly, they're only accessible by prop stylists back in the day.
Speaker:So the prop stylists are the only people who can get into these places
Speaker:and choose the props for the shoot.
Speaker:That is so not the case anymore.
Speaker:Now, you don't have to get a prop stylist.
Speaker:I can get online and I can order a hundred different single plates.
Speaker:Whether it be from eBay or Etsy or even from Macy's and Crate and Barrel,
Speaker:they get delivered to the house or the studio, wherever we're shooting.
Speaker:And there they are.
Speaker:And I don't need to pay a prop stylist to be an intermediary for me.
Speaker:When doing that, you, you, as the writer here, you broke the narrative divide.
Speaker:I jumped to cookbooks after the internet.
Speaker:You went to cookbooks after the internet.
Speaker:So before the internet.
Speaker:Not many photos.
Speaker:You had to have a prop stylist.
Speaker:They were the only way you could access props.
Speaker:Really.
Speaker:The photographer took all day.
Speaker:It was a very expensive thing to do even one shoot.
Speaker:And just to say back in the day, Everything was shot on film, so they
Speaker:would set up a shot if you weren't this fancy photographer who sat on a stool
Speaker:with flip phone, as I told you, but most photographers would set up a shot,
Speaker:and then they would take a Polaroid of it to catch the light, and then you
Speaker:would wait for the Polaroid to develop.
Speaker:I'm not kidding.
Speaker:This is like 2001.
Speaker:You'd wait for the Polaroid to develop, and you would look at it and see
Speaker:what you thought the light was doing in it before they started shooting.
Speaker:And then when they shot the actual final shot, they would take.
Speaker:I don't know, three, four hundred shots just to make sure that
Speaker:they had it somewhere in there because this was all on film.
Speaker:And you couldn't see what you were going to get until it was developed.
Speaker:Just like in the old days.
Speaker:So then the social media revolution happened and smartphones came along.
Speaker:Everything changed, and I think now, in today's world, people expect photographs
Speaker:to be highly prominent in cookbooks.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:In fact, our last book that came out last year, the Look and Cook Air
Speaker:Fryer Bible, we photographed every step in every recipe and turned
Speaker:in a book with seven photographs.
Speaker:It was insane, an insane amount of work with our photographer Eric, and
Speaker:we wanted this book to be as heavily photographed as we could get it.
Speaker:The current book is not quite that photographed to say the least, but
Speaker:still, nonetheless, we were doing it because I think people expected it.
Speaker:and in fact complain when cookbooks don't have pictures.
Speaker:Now, here's what is interesting to me, because I read a lot of reviews, not just
Speaker:of our cookbooks, but other cookbooks online, and people will say, Oh, this
Speaker:cookbook doesn't have enough photographs, or they'll buy an old book from like the
Speaker:90s, and they'll say, I bought it, and it didn't have any photographs in it.
Speaker:And I always want to say to them, Okay, you do know that most People, most
Speaker:cookbooks, the food in it is faked.
Speaker:And when they say, well, I can't tell what the dish looks like.
Speaker:And I think, well, you're still not really seeing what the dish looks like
Speaker:because the prop stylists are using and the food stylists are using all kinds
Speaker:of tricks with paint, with latex paint.
Speaker:They're using all kinds of ways to get shimmer on things and shine.
Speaker:Bowl of cereal often has gold.
Speaker:Glue as the milk.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:Elmer's white glue as the milk.
Speaker:I mean there are all kinds of fakes going on.
Speaker:Mm-Hmm.
Speaker:. Again, Bruce and I just have this absolute, I don't know what
Speaker:creed that we refuse for anything to be fake in any photograph.
Speaker:Refuse it down to the level of Bruce adds, I don't know, salt to a cake, which
Speaker:you would never see in a slice of cake.
Speaker:No, you would never see it, but, but you make it exactly
Speaker:as the recipe lies on the page.
Speaker:And the other thing that happened.
Speaker:Post internet is that we photograph a lot.
Speaker:We're not using film.
Speaker:We see exactly what we're getting right away.
Speaker:So rather than spend a whole day on one photo, we now spend a day and get
Speaker:anywhere from 15 to 30 shots in a single
Speaker:day.
Speaker:And there's two reasons for that.
Speaker:And two reasons we're able to move at a quicker speed.
Speaker:One is that we've shot the, with, uh, Eric, our photographer, Eric Metzger.
Speaker:Um, Now this is our 13th book, so, uh, we have a kind of honed, what do I say,
Speaker:rhythm with Eric that we can get into and we can just blow through the shoots.
Speaker:But there are two other things.
Speaker:One is that the cameras are just so much better and the cameras are digital
Speaker:and we're looking at digital shots on a screen so everything can be immediately
Speaker:adjusted from what the camera takes.
Speaker:And two, um, this may sound funny, but it's the truth.
Speaker:Two, once the photograph is taken, the AI takes over and
Speaker:the AI can adjust the lights.
Speaker:The AI can adjust and make sure that every photograph has the
Speaker:same quality of light in it.
Speaker:Maybe not the same directionality, but the same intensity of the light,
Speaker:the same warmth of the browns and the yellows can appear across photographs.
Speaker:This is all what AI brings to the game.
Speaker:So, what it has done is it has permitted us to speed up and produce better results.
Speaker:More photographs, which is
Speaker:what people want in cookbooks.
Speaker:And we talked about props and how I can get all these props
Speaker:delivered to the house now.
Speaker:But there's something else you have to think about with photographs.
Speaker:And that is, what is the surface
Speaker:you're putting the food on?
Speaker:I don't think that a lot of people who are not in the industry
Speaker:know that that's even an issue.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:So in the past, we would have, you know, butcher block slabs and
Speaker:marble slabs and Tiled slabs and heavy, heavy slabs that have to be
Speaker:changed out to put the stuff under,
Speaker:let's just say, because, you know, let's say you're, you're shooting a plate,
Speaker:let's say you're shooting a burger and a beer on a plate, but that plate and that
Speaker:glass of beer have to go on something.
Speaker:They have to go on something.
Speaker:They can't just be floating in the middle of the air.
Speaker:And so we would get these heavy, heavy slabs of surfaces and
Speaker:we'd have to change them out.
Speaker:And then we decided we would do a few shoots with fabrics.
Speaker:And so I would buy hundreds of beautiful fabrics, but.
Speaker:Between each shot, Mark had to iron them and make sure they were flat.
Speaker:Yep, yep.
Speaker:And we had to clip the fabrics to the board so that they were
Speaker:completely flat even after ironing.
Speaker:And what are we doing now?
Speaker:Now, we are using, believe it or not, linoleum.
Speaker:Not linoleum.
Speaker:Vinyl.
Speaker:Vinyl.
Speaker:Um, there are prop places and surface places like poppy B P O P P Y B E E that
Speaker:the kids are using like crazy for internet social media influencers and feeds.
Speaker:These are large pieces of vinyl that are made to look like wood, leather.
Speaker:They're printed with various surfaces on them, and we're using poppy be
Speaker:like crazy for our shoots because we can get so many brilliant and
Speaker:beautiful surfaces out of this.
Speaker:And because they have this map.
Speaker:Finish that slightly reflects the light that it does look like marble
Speaker:on camera and like some wood on
Speaker:camera and faux painting And it's just it's weather.
Speaker:It's weird.
Speaker:We don't insist on real
Speaker:food But the wood now underneath the shot is mostly fake.
Speaker:We are still shooting a little bit on butcher block Yeah, we did shoot
Speaker:Eric brought a piece of travertine and he bought a piece of marble to the
Speaker:slash that's still sitting upstairs in our house, but he brought those
Speaker:surfaces, but mostly we're shooting on these vinyl surfaces that are
Speaker:printed to look like certain things.
Speaker:And I was
Speaker:gorgeous.
Speaker:I
Speaker:was resistant to this.
Speaker:If I brought up the idea to Bruce first, I said, Oh, look at
Speaker:these, these weird new surfaces.
Speaker:And then I started seeing them in people's feeds, influencers,
Speaker:food influencers feeds.
Speaker:I was like, well, let's try it.
Speaker:And so Eric.
Speaker:The photographer ordered one and shot it in his studio in York.
Speaker:And he's like, no, this is perfectly fine.
Speaker:So we ordered,
Speaker:I ordered 16 different surfaces that they're expensive.
Speaker:They're much more expensive than buying fabric, but it allows us to
Speaker:go so much faster And we will have these surfaces for future shoots.
Speaker:Yeah, it's really crazy how it's all changed and how photography
Speaker:itself has changed and how in fact photography itself is now so crucial
Speaker:to the success of a cookbook.
Speaker:Before we get to the art, Last segment of our podcast, the traditional what's
Speaker:making us happy in food this week.
Speaker:Let me say that we do have a newsletter.
Speaker:It comes out about twice a month and it's going to be once a month this
Speaker:month because we are in cookbook production, but about twice a month.
Speaker:You can find it on our website, cookingwithbruceandmark.
Speaker:com or just bruceandmark.
Speaker:com.
Speaker:It's right there on the opening page.
Speaker:You can sign up for the newsletter there.
Speaker:I do not allow your email to be collected in any way.
Speaker:In fact, I don't even see it.
Speaker:So you can sign up and you can unsubscribe at any time and get our newsletter, which
Speaker:is sometimes connected to recipes on this podcast, but sometimes it's totally
Speaker:disconnected and it's about, I don't know, our life in extremely rural New England.
Speaker:All right, up next, the final segment of the podcast, what's
Speaker:making us happy in food this week.
Speaker:What's making me happy is kina kina now, you might think it's China China
Speaker:if you look at the bottle But Eric our photographer who shoots a lot
Speaker:of bar stuff says it's kina kina.
Speaker:So I'll trust him.
Speaker:It's an amaro That is spiced with with gentian and chinkona bark So it's bitter
Speaker:but it also has cinnamon and it has warm spices in it and it's It is so delicious.
Speaker:So that's what's making me happy.
Speaker:What's making
Speaker:me happy in Food This Week is a little hint for what's ahead in the next book.
Speaker:But I just want to tell you that I have discovered that one of the best
Speaker:things to put on hummus is Very spicy tomato conserve or chutney and a very
Speaker:spicy tomato conserve on hummus is a delicious lunch on purchased hummus.
Speaker:Explain what
Speaker:a conserve
Speaker:is.
Speaker:A conserve is a lower sugar jam on Often with nuts or other aromatics like ginger
Speaker:in the mix, uh, lower sugar, bigger flavor profile, in this case, spicy.
Speaker:So you're adding chilies or red pepper flakes or something to make it hot.
Speaker:And that hot red.
Speaker:tomato chutney or conserve.
Speaker:It's so tasty on a wholeness.
Speaker:I just eat it like that with wasa crackers.
Speaker:Spectacular lunch.
Speaker:It makes me very happy.
Speaker:All right, that's our podcast for this week.
Speaker:Thanks for being on the journey with us.
Speaker:We very much appreciate your being here.
Speaker:And we very much
Speaker:appreciate your spending time with us.
Speaker:Every week we tell you what's making us happy and fun.
Speaker:So tell us what is making you happy in food this week.
Speaker:Go to our Facebook group, Cooking with Bruce and Mark.
Speaker:There will be a place there where you can post and tell us
Speaker:what's making you happy in food.
Speaker:And the really fun ones we will talk about here on Cooking with Bruce and Mark.
